4 Steps to Accomplishing Your Goals – Step 4: Reflect and Celebrate

This is the final step of the 4 Steps to Accomplishing Your Goals series, a walk-through of the process I use to accomplish many things throughout the year. I’m also highlighting stories from people who’ve accomplished big goals in their life or business.

Today is Step 4: Reflect and Celebrate. We’ll go over some questions to help you learn from your experience and sustain any lasting changes you’ve made. You’ll also celebrate and create a memory of this accomplishment to inspire future success.

Keep reading to learn more about Step 4, and then leave a comment with the story of one of your recent successes.

The four steps each also have worksheets that help you walk through this process. If you want them, be sure to answer Yes!! on that section on the Insiders signup form (if you’re already signed up, you can update your profile by using the same email you used before).

Step 4: Reflect and Celebrate

Reflect

Reflection helps us to summarize and bring closure to our experiences, so we can learn from them and remember things in ways we wouldn’t if we just rushed to the next goal.

If you didn’t experience success on this goal this time, reflect on this experience and learn from it so you don’t have to start from the very beginning the next time you try it. Even if you didn’t accomplish your entire goal, what progress did you make? (The smallest of successes can help motivate you to try this or another goal again in the future.)

Questions to think about (regardless of whether you completely accomplished your goal):

What worked/went well in this process?

Are there things you can do for the next goal to ensure that success again?

What didn’t work/didn’t go so well in this process?

What are some reasons those things didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped?

How can you prevent these things from becoming issues again in the future?

What did you learn from this experience overall?

If your goal includes a permanent behavior change, also consider these questions:

How will you maintain your new behavior?

What kind of support will you need?

What challenges do you anticipate long-term?

What will you need to do now so that you can continue your new behavior when things get difficult?

Follow up with your mentor/accountability partner/supportive community from Step 2 (even if you don’t feel like you have good news). They can help you to see the things that worked well, pull out lessons and strategies for the future, and move you forward to the next action step.

Celebrate!

If you didn’t already plan in Step 3 how you’ll celebrate achieving the final goal, now’s the time to do it! Give yourself a big reward for your big accomplishment. Also remember the person or people who provided support and accountability. Share your success with them and let them celebrate with you.

Taking time to create a memory of this success can be helpful later when you’re facing something bigger and more challenging. (This is one of the tricks I use to push past barriers on current goals – see Step 3 for more details).

In the Olympics, winners get trophies. What will you have as a reminder of your success?

It doesn’t have to be a physical object (unless you want one), but at least take some time to really pay attention to how this success feels to you, the things that are happening around you in this moment, how people react to your news, what it was like to go through the challenges and succeed anyway, etc. These are all things you can think back on when you need a reminder that you’re capable of accomplishing your goals.

Want the worksheet to help you through this process? Sign up for the Insiders list and answer Yes!! on that section of the signup form to let me know to email it to you.(If you’re already signed up, you can update your profile by using the same email you used before).